We Rely On Your Support: This site is primarily supported by advertisements. Ads are what have allowed this site to be maintained for the past 13 years. We do our best to ensure only clean, relevant ads are shown, when any nasty ads are detected, we work to remove them ASAP. If you would like to view the site without ads while still supporting our work, please consider our ad-free Phoronix Premium. You can also consider a tip via PayPal.

Earlier this week we had published ATI
benchmarks of the open-source
Mesa stack and X.Org
in the Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu
7.04. While the open-source graphics drivers have matured a lot over the past
eighteen months and many new features have been added, the ATI performance with
an R430 GPU really hadn't improved in the newer releases. To see if the open-source
Intel situation is any different, we have carried out similar tests with an Intel
945G Chipset across the past four Ubuntu releases.

With Ubuntu
7.04, Ubuntu
7.10, Ubuntu
8.04, and Ubuntu
8.10 we had used the Phoronix
Test Suite to run twelve tests on each distribution release. These tests included
GtkPerf, Nexuiz, Tremulous, Urban Terror, World of Padman, and x11perf. The version
of the Phoronix Test Suite in use was 1.4.1 Orkdal. We had used the same test
system as we did in our earlier ATI Mesa article when it came to the use of an
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400,
ASRock Conroe1333-DVI/H,
2GB of OCZ DDR2-800MHz memory, 200GB Seagate ST3200826AS HDD, and then instead
of using the ATI Radeon X800XL we had used the integrated Intel 945G graphics.

The 8.10 release of Ubuntu provided the Linux
2.6.27 kernel, X.Org 7.4 with X
Server 1.5.2, and Mesa
7.2. When it came to 2D acceleration, the xf86-video-intel
driver on Ubuntu 7.04 was using XAA
while all the newer releases we were running with EXA.
With the 3D tests, the results weren't deliverable from Ubuntu 7.10
due to a bug with the Intel driver that would cause the monitor to lose its signal
when changing the mode to 1280 x 1024 for the testing.

The mission at Phoronix since 2004 has centered around enriching the Linux hardware experience. In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also use our Amazon.com or NewEgg.com shopping links when making online purchases or contribute to Phoronix through a PayPal tip.